ROLLO Diversity Award due March 17th at 11:00 a.m.

Multicultural and Diversity Affairs proudly announces our call for nominations for the J. Michael Rollo Diversity Impact Award for 2015. Dr. Rollo served as a dedicated staff member in the Dean of Students Office for over twenty years and worked tirelessly to impact the diverse student body at UF. This award recognizes students who exemplify the value of diversity by actively contributing to and supporting multiple communities across campus. We seek to recognize students who demonstrate leadership and inspire others to commit to creating a more diverse and inclusive campus community.

Academic Style in the Humanities: A Faculty and Graduate (Grant) Writing Workshop

Eric Hayot (Pennsylvania State University)

Monday, 9 March 2015, 12:00-3:00 pm

Smathers Library (East) 100

Writing well is central to academic careers, and yet, academics spend very little time talking about, teaching, or working on their writing. Or at least so argues Eric Hayot in his new book, The Elements of Academic Style. Pairing honest talk about fear, procrastination, and productivity with practical advice for writers across the humanities, Hayot pushes us all to think not only about how we write, but how we feel about writing, and how we institutionalize those feelings in our personal and departmental practices.

This participatory workshop will explore some basic principles of successful academic writing in the humanities, with a special focus on grant-writing. We will discuss the following topics:

1. Titles. What makes a good title (in your field)? How can you meet the challenge of writing a title that appeals to a broader audience of grant application readers, while still communicating to insiders that you know what you’re doing? Are there titles that work better for books than for articles, or vice versa? Please bring examples of your favorite (or least favorite titles) for discussion.

2. Examples. How do you handle the balance between the general concept or idea of the grant and the specific examples that make it feel “live”? How does that balance compare to the balance needed for scholarly work in your field? How do books, articles, and grants differ in the way they handle the balance between the general and the particular?

3. So what? How do you make the argument that your work matters, without seeming too aggressive (“everyone who’s ever lived until now was wrong?”) or too uninteresting (“no one has ever looked at this thing I’m looking at, but that doesn’t mean that it’s important”)? How do you handle your relationship to other scholars, or to topics of general public interest?

Please bring along a sample of your own writing—ideally, work in progress on an academic grant or fellowship proposal, or an article or book chapter—so that we can break into groups and discuss these issues intensively. We understand the potential time conflicts created by attending a workshop during the teaching day, and thus welcome you to attend all or part of the event as fits your schedule.

Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies, and the Head of the Department of Comparative Literature, at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Chinese Dreams (2004), The Hypothetical Mandarin (2009), On Literary Worlds (2012), and The Elements of Academic Style (2014), as well as of a number of articles and book chapters, including “Academic Writing, I Love You. Really, I Do,” which appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of Critical Inquiry.

This event is part of the 2014-15 grant-writing in the humanities series organized by the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, with support from the CLAS Dean’s Office and the UF Office of Research.

Submitted by Tim Blanton, Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere